While there has been some reaction to the mistakes made in “crowdsourcing” information after the bombing at the Boston Marathon, Meier unpacks the reasons why. He concludes two main reasons:

(1) the crowd is digitally illiterate
(2) the platforms used were not appropriate for the tasks at hand

Rather than try to duplicate what he has written, follow this link to read his analysis, which is a fairly simple read. The crowd can share lots of useless data and we need to figure out better ways to verify this data before joining Alice in chasing rabbits down holes. Meier is the behind the Verily project that should help with this, but we need more of these types of projects and more brains looking at this area, building on what we know already.